Elephants Dream 720p - (2006 Lang: English)

Мечта слонов - История очень проста. Речь идёт о том, каким образом люди создают идеи, истории, вымыслы, сущности и сообщают или навязывают их другим. Таким образом Пруг создал (в своей голове) идею особого места (Машины), которую он пытается «показать» Эмо. Когда Эмо не признает его рассказ, Пруг в отчаянии ударяет его. В действительности это притча человеческих отношений: Вы можете думать о множестве вещей (деньги, религия, достояние) вместо машины Пруга, — сюжет не говорит, что создание идей это плохо, только намекает, что лучше делиться, чем навязывать их другим.

Good idea in concept, horrible idea in reality

As an animator myself on an almost zero budget I love seeing short films like these made by a non big name company. The visuals as other reviews have said are stunning (the only thing I've ever managed to create on Blender was a flying splodgy shape!). The story is confusing but to me that makes it all the more interesting. Even if there isn't a definitive explanation it's always fun debating it with others who have seen it. It's also nice to see characters that are original instead of the "straight man and comedy side kick" combo that we see so much of these days in animation. Great film! And to top it off they offer the film for free in every format from mobile phone to HDTV along with all their files, which is a great resource for other animators.

Elephants Dream (code-named Orange) is a computer-generated short film that was produced almost completely using the free software 3D suite Blender (except for the modular sound studio Reaktor and the cluster that rendered the final production, which ran Mac OS X). It premiered on 24 March 2006, after about 8 months of work. Beginning in September 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later renamed Machina and then to Elephants Dream, referring to a Dutch tradition used by parents to abruptly end children's bedtime stories with the introduction of a sneezing elephant.

The film was first announced in May 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender was the primary piece of software used in the creation of the film. The project was joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has his or her name listed in the film's credits. The bulk of processing for rendering the film was donated by the BSU Xseed, a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5-based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame. The completed film is 10 minutes 54 seconds long, including 1 minute and 28 seconds of credits.

The film's purpose was primarily to field test, develop and showcase the capabilities of open source software, demonstrating what can be done with such tools in the field of organizing and producing quality content for films.

During the film's development, several new features such as an integrated node-based compositor, hair and fur rendering, rewritten animation system and render pipeline, and many workflow tweaks and upgrades were added into Blender especially for the project.

The film's content was released under the Creative Commons license CC BY, so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please (provided attribution is given). The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the film on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.

The film was released for download directly and via BitTorrent on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.

The movie was made mostly as an experiment, rather than to tell a certain story, and therefore has a strong arbitrary and surreal atmosphere.[citation needed] It features two men, Proog, who is older and more experienced, and Emo, who is young and nervous, living in a miraculous construction referred to only as "The Machine". Proog tries to introduce Emo to The Machine's nature but Emo is reluctant and argues about The Machine's purpose. The creators originally intended for the movie to show the abstraction of a computer.

Bassam Kurdali, Director of Elephants Dream, explained the plot of the movie by saying:

"The story is very simple—I'm not sure you can call it a complete story even—It is about how people create ideas/stories/fictions/social realities and communicate them or impose them on others. Thus Proog has created (in his head) the concept of a special place/machine, that he tries to "show" to Emo. When Emo doesn't accept his story, Proog becomes desperate and hits him. It's a parable of human relationships really—You can substitute many ideas (money, religion, social institutions, property) instead of Proog's machine—the story doesn't say that creating ideas is bad, just hints that it is better to share ideas than force them on others. There are lots of little clues/hints about this in the movie—many little things have a meaning—but we're not very "tight" with it, because we are hoping people will have their own ideas about the story, and make a new version of the movie. In this way (and others) we tie the story of the movie with the "open movie" idea."

The original title was to be Machina but was dropped due to pronunciation issues.

Considering this movie was done with a tiny budget and is only ten minutes in length one cannot expect extensive depth of character and storyline as some reviewers here seem to complain about.

There is very little that can be developed in little over ten minutes -- plot and character-wise so the developers chose to take a more abstract route. If you do not attempt to get hard facts out of it and try to see it as a more open-minded experiment that may result in multiple interpretations then I think you will find it enjoyable.

Also the computer animation is just amazing for a small budget film that was developed entirely with a product made and given away freely.

Great short that's visually stunning and leaves you talking about it for ages!